Is Your Child’s Preschool or Daycare Abusive?

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It’s been almost 2.5 years since I’ve written in this blog. While many will blame the bleary-eyed days of new parenthood, the reality is the early days were not that bad. Not easy during a global pandemic, but manageable. It was the toddler years that were trying, particularly as we unknowingly sent our daughter to a preschool with highly questionable, some might say abusive or neglectful, practices. Even typing that feels heavy. Many times victims of abuse are in denial, feel shame, or that they are “going crazy,” and that it's all in their heads. The perpetrators are gaslighters and manipulators that prey on this and further silence their victims. I’ve seen these patterns one too many times from my own therapy clients. To experience this myself was humbling.

Research indicates that most parents grossly overestimate the quality of care that their child is receiving. Studies from the National Institutes of Health indicate most childcare in the United States as being “fair” with only 10 percent being rated as “excellent.” Parental reports are the exact opposite; they rate their care as “excellent” with only 12 percent being “fair.”

Naturally, as parents, when we consult other parents in our child’s classroom and they shrug everything abnormal as “normal,” it can be confusing. I recall multiple instances of parents telling me hitting and kicking in the classroom was “normal,” when my work as a clinician tells me it’s not. Repeated acts of aggression from children stem from somewhere, including the home (for example, parents fighting, traveling excessively) and school setting.

The World Health Organization defines child maltreatment as “all forms of physical and emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, and exploitation that result in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, development or dignity.” Gonzales, Mirabal, and McCall (2023) define four types of abuse including neglect, physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse:

• Neglect may include inadequate health care, education, supervision, protection from hazards in the environment, and unmet basic needs such as clothing and food. Neglect is the most common form of child abuse.
• Physical abuse may include beating, shaking, burning, and biting.
• Psychological abuse includes verbal abuse, humiliation, and acts that scare or terrorize a child, which may result in future psychological illness of the child.
• Sexual abuse is defined as “the involvement of dependent, developmentally immature children and adolescents in sexual activities, which they do not fully comprehend, to which they are unable to give consent, or that violate the social taboos of family roles.”

Furthermore, according to Gonzalez and colleagues, many of these signs of abuse are missed altogether by healthcare providers. Meaning, that annual well-child visits may not uncover any of this. This is because abuse and neglect can occur on a much subtler scale than many may realize. While news stories regarding the arrests of daycare workers physically abusing children abound, most parents miss the psychological abuse and neglect that could be significantly harming their children.

According to legal experts in the field of daycare abuse, common signs of neglect include:

• Your child is always hungry or thirsty when you pick them up from daycare
• The sudden appearance of nightmares
• Your child “regresses” back to an earlier age and acts like a baby
• Excessive shyness
• Unusual scrapes, bruises, or injuries
• Seeing your child outside the facility or otherwise unsupervised
• Unusual changes in the behavior of your child

In the case of our 3-year-old daughter, we noticed a rage unlike any she’d ever displayed last December. My husband, an attorney said, “It’s like she’s being abused at that school.” Given my clinical training, I initially chalked it up to “emotional restraint collapse” otherwise known as “after-school restraint collapse,” the phenomenon whereby a child who seems “fine” at school comes home and has meltdowns. We have experienced this before, and it was nothing new to us. As a clinical psychologist, I’m extremely wary of the dangers of over-pathologizing. In the end, there were many warning signs and we should have listened to our gut earlier (a second post will be forthcoming listing these warning signs).

While the teacher was never fired, she did leave mid-term “due to personal reasons.” Our trust in the system has been deeply broken. Fortunately, we acted quickly (once our own denial and disbelief abated) and moved her to a loving, warm, and nurturing Reggio Emilia-based preschool where she has been thriving. A new, ebullient child emerged, one not terrorized by an aggressive teacher or aggressive classmates.

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Parents who have any doubts that something is off can find the courage and strength to call into question what others may call “normal.” I will never forget the image of this teacher yanking a child by the collar back in August. Who was I to see one interaction and jump to conclusions? When it comes to your children, jump to that conclusion, trust your gut, and don’t be swayed by anyone else who tells you otherwise.